HOUSTON  Hurricane Rita left this question: If a successful emergency evacuation involves 100-mile highway backups, motorists running out of gas and water, widespread road rage and the death of 23 seniors in a freak bus accident, what would a failure look like?

Vehicles jam I-45 as people from south Texas evacuate in advance of Hurricane Rita.

By Stan Honda, AFP/Getty Images

Rita showed that evacuating a sprawling metro area is at best slow and difficult, and that sometimes an evacuation can rival its cause as a source of misery.

"The traffic looked worse than the storm," said Jennifer Powell, a University of Houston student who reluctantly stayed in her second-floor Galveston apartment after deciding it would take too long to flee.

But George Friedman, chairman of Stratfor, a private intelligence firm based in Austin, summed up expert opinion: The evacuation went about as well as could be expected. "There was substantial inconvenience," he said. "But if you move 3 million people, you're going to cause a lot of inconvenience."

In a nation with a rich history of earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, blizzards, volcanoes and terrorist attacks, there are more potential disasters than can be planned or prepared for.

"You don't have the resources to childproof the entire country," Friedman said.

If a hurricane that took a week to reach the Gulf Coast could provoke such chaos, what would happen in case of a terrorist's radiological or chemical strike?

"The nightmare that we all have is that, God forbid, there's a terrorist attack of some kind on a major American city that requires evacuation without warning," Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said Sunday on CNN.

Rita struck Saturday morning near the Texas-Louisiana border with top winds of 120 mph but inflicted far less damage than feared, especially in Houston and other heavily populated areas. It quickly weakened to a minimal hurricane and then a tropical storm.

Hence the recrimination over why so many fled Houston. Those sitting on the highway had plenty of time to ponder.

"It caught (Texas officials) off-guard. I think they were so involved in being generous to Louisiana (after Hurricane Katrina), they didn't work out a plan for gas or anything here," said Christine Leu, who spent 16 hours in traffic.

Houston Mayor Bill White expressed no regrets about evacuating for a storm that went elsewhere. "You can't predict the weather. Hurricanes can move in any direction. If you evacuate two or three times and it saves your life only once, that once is enough."

Texas Gov. Rick Perry said that most people "did a great job of listening to the officials and moving out in a relatively orderly (fashion). I know 15 hours in your car is a frustrating thing, but getting them out of that storm's path was the mission, and they did it."

A massive exodus

If too few people evacuated for Hurricane Katrina, too many evacuated for Rita. Prompted by officials' broad, forceful orders and memories of how Katrina flooded New Orleans last month, nearly 3 million Texans fled on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

In the island city of Galveston, which was destroyed by a hurricane in 1900, about 90% cleared out.

The later you left, the longer you sat. Danny Hart, 37, co-owner of a restaurant-nightclub in Galveston, fled Wednesday and spent 12 hours on the road. His wife, who left earlier, made the same trip in four hours; his partner, who left later, spent 24 hours traveling 60 miles. "The evacuation plan was good for Galveston," Hart said. "The problem was, everyone in Houston left."

"They should have evacuated by ZIP code," said Monica Hackett, who was stuck in her car for 13 hours with her six children, her mother, a cousin and two dogs — and never got out of Houston.

But Friedman, the intelligence analyst, argued that it's impossible to plan truly large-scale evacuations, or to break them into stages: "Do you want to be the person with the last ticket to leave?" he asked. "You can't evacuate a population of 2 to 3 million and control when they're going to evacuate."

Some saw room for modest improvement, such as faster conversion of two-way streets and highways into one-way evacuation routes. In New Orleans and Houston, half the highway lanes went virtually unused until the end of the evacuation.

"We need to fine-tune the planning so that contra-lanes are open earlier so that all the outgoing traffic can go on both sides of a freeway earlier than was done in Rita," said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, on ABC's This Week.

Perry, the governor, said he was proud that both directions of Interstate 45 eventually were opened to handle people flowing north from Houston: "You don't just go out and plug up an interstate on one side and shift it over in an hour or two. I mean, it takes some time. It takes some personnel."

Such measures can improve the flow of traffic by 66%, according to a 2001 Louisiana State University study. But such steps also can cause an increase in accidents, restrict the flow of emergency vehicles and make it hard for drivers to exit for fuel and food.

In general, Perry said, the evacuation taught valuable lessons.

"We will learn from this one," he said. "I think that's really important that we're sharing that information, so when this happens — it may not be a hurricane, it may be some other event that occurs — a city like Los Angeles or Miami can use some of the things that we've learned in Katrina and in Rita."

Hurricane Rita smashed into a region that is wealthier, more mobile and less densely populated than the one devastated by Hurricane Katrina. According to an Associated Press analysis of Census data, most of Rita's evacuees were less likely to live in poverty, more likely to own a car and less likely to be a member of a minority group than were Katrina's victims.

Experts said the mobility of people in Rita's path — combined with a new sense of urgency after Katrina — led to a more thorough evacuation.

"They have cars," said Carnot Nelson, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida. "They have a way to leave. It's as simple as that."

But will those who evacuated last week do the same when the next storm comes blowing?

Hurricane Floyd redux

That issue was raised in 1999 by Hurricane Floyd, which also introduced the problem of people who shouldn't flee a storm but do.

Floyd, the largest peacetime evacuation in American history, was really the largest over-evacuation; more than 3 million people hit the roads, jamming traffic from South Florida to South Carolina.

People living inland who had not been ordered to evacuate saw images of the 600-mile-wide monster on television and started their engines. Also, Floyd (like Rita) was the second hurricane in a one-two punch. Hurricane Dennis had come ashore in North Carolina as a tropical storm about a week earlier.

The result was familiar to anyone in Houston last week. Lines of cars stretched for hundreds of miles on several interstates. Many motorists could not find gas, food or a bathroom.

The storm eventually weakened and didn't turn inland until it reached North Carolina. But if people had waited longer to evacuate, and if Floyd had picked up speed and turned left, the result could have been disastrous. That, however, was not the lesson many coastal residents drew from the evacuation experience; many told reporters they'd never do it again.

Here's what some Texans endured last week as they tried to get away from Rita:

Solie Jimenez left the Houston suburb of Pasadena at 4 a.m. Thursday with her 6-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son heading for Lufkin, more than 100 miles northeast. But 24 hours later, they were still in their car — and still not out of Houston.

"We were in the contra-flow lane," Jimenez, 29, an accountant, said of the plan that reversed the highway's southbound lanes for northbound traffic to ease congestion. "That was a huge mistake. It was worse than on the other side. It just stopped. We sat there forever. It took us nine hours to go 10 miles.

"I finally called my mother and said, 'I can't take this anymore. We have to get out of here.' "

Finally she jumped the curb, got off the highway and wound up at a shelter around 4 a.m. Friday. In 24 hours, they had traveled 40 miles.

Christine Leu was trying to drive the 100 miles from her Houston suburb to College Station with two kids and a sick sister. She thought it would take three hours.

After a dozen hours on the highway, fatigue and thirst took their toll on her driving ability, she recalled. "How do you mess up bumper-to-bumper? I bumped the people in front of me. I rolled back into the people behind me."

She pulled off the highway and knocked on a front door. The residents helped find a hospital for Leu's sister; she and the children wound up in a shelter.

Monica Hackett said that on Highway 290 in Houston, "People were wrecking into each other, not paying attention. They were so tired, cussing, rude. I heard on the radio, people saying, 'Everybody's being so nice on the road.' They were not. They were flipping people off, cutting around you. I was so worn out."

The evacuation of the sick and elderly proved to be a major challenge in the evacuation, just as it had in New Orleans before and after Katrina hit.

Otis Patterson, 44, a cross-country truck driver, said the story of the seniors killed in the bus fire resonated with him. His father, Ozan Patterson, 80, a dialysis patient and stroke victim, needs supplementary oxygen 24 hours a day. Patterson's sister, Lorraine Nelson, drove their father from his home in Port Arthur, Texas, to a cousin's house in Austin. They were stuck in traffic from 11 p.m. Wednesday until 2:30 p.m. Thursday. His father ran out of bottled oxygen.

"There was nothing they could do except keep the air (conditioning) burning as high as they could. My sister called ahead from Houston to set up dialysis treatment for Friday afternoon."

Their father survived. "It was pretty scary," Patterson said.

They were lucky — this time

Amid the confusion, some Houstonians decided not to go.

Laura Van Ness stayed in her apartment on the eighth floor of a sturdy, 1927 building in Houston that sits 50 feet above sea lea level. She was prepared with extra water, food, flashlights and batteries. She'd taped her windows and moved the furniture and oriental rugs into the hallway. But Rita provided so little excitement that Van Ness went to bed during the storm. "We never heard loud rain or even lightning," she said. Her building never lost electricity.

Despite her relatively happy experience staying put, Van Ness said she hoped other people won't be complacent: "You shouldn't decide to stay because the hurricane didn't hit you last time."

The television images of gridlock, abandoned vehicles and exhausted families left some residents of Galveston swearing they would not go through it again.

"Next time, a lot of people aren't leaving. I know I'm not," said Mary Garza, co-owner with her husband Willie of Mary's Place, a nightclub near the historic Strand district. They had driven 22 hours last week to get to Lake Livingston, normally a two-hour drive.

Others were more open to evacuating the next time a Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane bears down on their part of coastal Texas.

Jacob Safada drove for 16 hours Wednesday and early Thursday to get to Lufkin, a trip that usually takes 2 1/2 hours. "What can you do sometimes? That's life," he said Sunday while sprucing up his T-shirt shop on the Strand. "No complaints — absolutely not."

O'Driscoll reported from Houston; Wolf from Galveston; Hampson from New Jersey.